Design work done in 2017

This also made the download page better for power users who were asking for a direct download link.

Open problems

Suggest human strategies to avoid targeted malware:

Clone from a friend

Use a different computer than yours

Use Linux if available around you

Investigate how we could monitor the usage of the assistant: most
common path, failures, people leaving, etc. But this can have
privacy issues.

Integrate system requirements.

Integrate information about organizations offering training.

Future work

Faster checksum computation in Tails Verification

DAVE used to rely on a native call (nsICryptoHash) which is not
available anymore to WebExtensions. It was so fast that we never felt
the need to measure how many seconds it took; probably less than 5.

Tails Verification relies on the Forge library and takes 45
seconds on a Core i5 M520.

Asking upstream a new API for checksum calculation sounds hard as it
would require lobbying both Mozilla and Chrome. An alternative could be
to rewrite the checksum calculation in
WebAssembly.

Integrate warnings

Our warning page is good but it's also one of the
oldest page in our documentation and it would deserve a bit of work
(#8845). Furthermore, it would make a lot of sense to
integrate it in the assistant, to teach people about Tails as they are
installing it.

An idea would be to display our warnings while the ISO
image is downloaded (#9386).
The download page from 2017 makes this more complicated since the verification
extension cannot monitor the beginning and end of the download but most likely
not impossible.